Norwegian Festival Fights Binge Drinking with Cheap Beer

A music festival is offering cut-price beer to keep people from drinking too much

Wikimedia/Tim “Avatar” Bartel

A music festival in Norway has decided that offering very cheap beer is a good way to keep people from getting too drunk and rowdy.

A Norwegian music festival concerned about visitors drinking too much has decided to do the socially responsible thing and fight binge-drinking with cut-price alcohol. Many are confused about how exactly that will work.

According to The Local, Norway has some of the highest alcohol prices in Europe. A pint of beer reportedly sells for around $10.50 in Oslo, but the Midsommerfest music festival announced plans to price pints at a mere $4 this summer. That’s less than half the price of a pint elsewhere in the city, and organizers say it is just enough to recoup their cost, because they say they’re not trying to make a profit from alcohol sales and just look at beer as a way of enhancing the festival-going experience.

Organizer Nikolai André Toverud said the cheap beer was an attempt to remove the incentive for festivalgoers to show up already drunk before the music even begins.

“In many places, the routine is that the audience is sh*t-faced when they arrive," he said. "We want to level it out, so that people actually get something out of the festival, and we can better control our audience.”